Monday, August 20, 2012

ROUNDHOUSE ROUNDUP: A Family Write-In Campaign

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New MexicanAug. 19 2012

A woman’s place is in the House. A man’s is in the Senate. That could
almost be the motto of an Albuquerque couple — Bob Anderson and his
wife, Jeanne Pahls, both of whom are running as write-in candidates in
New Mexico this year.

Bob Anderson

Anderson, a political science professor at
Central New Mexico Community College, is a declared write-in candidate
for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by the retiring Sen. Jeff
Bingaman. Pahls, an Albuquerque teacher, is running for the open seat in
the 1st Congressional District. (There’s no write-in candidate here in
the 3rd Congressional District.)

Currently, there is only one
married couple in Congress, U.S. Reps. Connie Mack of Florida and Mary
Bono of California.

“We hadn’t really thought of that,” said Anderson in
a telephone interview last week when asked about the novelty of the
situation. “Jeanne and I were just talking about how there’s no choices
really in the Senate and House races here. … Heinrich and Wilson both
seem to be the candidates of the military-industrial complex.”

So
the couple, both of whom have a long history of involvement in civil
rights, war protests and other progressive causes, both decided to run.

Anderson
is running against Democrat Martin Heinrich, who is giving up his seat
in Congress to run, and Republican Heather Wilson, who served in the
House for 10 years. Anderson has run against Wilson before. In 1998,
when Wilson first won her seat in Congress, she defeated Democrat Phil
Maloof and Anderson, who ran as a Green Party candidate candidate.
Anderson got 10 percent of the vote in the general election that year.

Pahls
faces Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham and Republican Janice
Arnold-Jones in the race for the House seat currently held by Heinrich
and formerly by Wilson.

Pencil power: Both Anderson and Pahls have
adopted the pencil as a symbol and the slogan “Write for New Mexico” in
their campaigns to emphasize that they are write-in candidates.

In
New Mexico, it’s easy to become a declared write-in candidate. No messy
petitions, no primaries, no conventions. You just have to show up at
the Secretary of State’s Office 21 days after the June primary and file a
declaration of intent. Under current state law, the only write-in
ballots that are counted are those of official declared write-in
candidates. (So no, your vote for Mickey Mouse or SpongeBob Squarepants
will not count.)

The hard part is winning as a write-in. The last
successful write-in congressional candidate in New Mexico was the late
Joe Skeen, who won his 2nd District seat in 1980. But Skeen was a
special case. Democratic U.S. Rep Harold Runnels died in office after
that year’s primary.

Jeanne Pahls

No Republican had filed to run against the popular
Runnels, so no GOP candidate was on the ballot. Skeen became the de
facto Republican candidate. And he was helped by the fact that the
Democrats were split. The party nominated David King to run, which
angered Runnels’ widow, Dorothy, who also ran as a write-in.

Name
identification wasn’t a problem for Skeen in 1980. Not only had he
served in the state Senate for a decade or so, he’d been the Republican
nominee for governor twice in the 1970s, losing two very close races.
(He’d also been on the GOP ticket as Pete Domenici’s running mate in the
1970 gubernatorial race.) Skeen went on to serve 11 terms in Congress.

Occupy the ballot box:
Another difference between the Skeen write-in effort and the
Anderson/Pahls campaigns is that Skeen had access to the regular
Republican funding sources. Anderson said both he and Pahls were
inspired to run by the Occupy Wall Street movement and are emphasizing
their independence from corporations and financial institutions in their
campaigns.

He said on his website, “We will not have large
corporate donors, but that is OK. Voters are interested in hearing about
truth in politics. This is a time of crisis, voters are turning away
from worn- out ideas and politicians.”

Of course, whether enough
voters are willing to turn away from those politicians and take up a
pencil for Anderson and Pahls remains to be seen.